U. S. Department of commerce

There was a development that we worked on in Texas City where the developer wanted to guaranteed perspective buyers that accepting cases of extreme, extreme low tide, they would be able to bring a sailboat with a six-foot keel up to their house. So there was some economic value on being able to determine where the water was going to be in most cases and actually help them project that forward, in time. You know, with the subsidence and the sea level rise.

Doing these and tying these projects to a tidal datum, gives us the ability to project how often these projects will be to be revisited or re-dredged. At many points in the future.

So it helps them guestimate cost. It helps these individual homeowners' associations budget for how much money they're going to need to spend on dredging in the next decade.

We also use tidal datums when we're helping in wetland mitigation. Because the tide, the value, the elevation of the tide, at mean high water or mean low water, has a very, very tight correlation with what types of vegetation will go where.

So in these kind of projects, we work hand and hand, with the biologist, to determine where to plant vegetation, what vegetation to plant and how to protect the vegetation going forward.

And finally, the major reason we use this is to help plan where to put structures and how high to place the structures within a flood zone. It doesn't make much sense to put a low structure in an area that's going to be overtaken by tide, in the case of a storm or in the case of just normal weather events.

So planning where to place structures and how far from the littoral boundary or from the edge of where the damage would be greatest, helps future planning. That's me.

DR. JEFFRESS: Well that was quick.

MR. BLASKEY: I know.

DR. JEFFRESS: Can I just, you only took about seven minutes of that presentation. Can I just ask a question?

And maybe you can discuss what we call in Texas, the Texas Open Beaches Act and the easement that goes with that, and the problems with the severance case.

MR. BLASKEY: Sure. Sure. Originally the State of Texas had a statute, it was the Open Beaches Act, and it provided for a rolling easement that went from mean low water to the line of vegetation along the beach.

And it was reserved for all public use. Later that was codified into the state constitution, which gave it more strength.

And then, what was it, 2012 a lady named Carol Severance sued the Land Office on the validity of the Open Beaches Act. Which she ended up winning, but it was a very constrained ruling stating that the state only had right to have an easement where an easement could be perfected. By either prescription or through time and use and memorial.

So with the shoreline eroding, the prescriptive easement can never be established because it was never in the same place as the beach was moving. So it's thrown this whole little island into a bit of fuss as the status of the open beach has been brought into serious question.

And that's, you were more involved in that than I was, weren't you?

MR. NEWBY: Somewhat, yes.

MR. BLASKEY: Yes.

MR. NEWBY: But it was specific to Galveston Island.

MR. BLASKEY: And it was just specifically the West end of Galveston Island. Everything from about 57th Street in Galveston West to the San Luis Toll Bridge is where this ruling kind of took place.

But the logic they used to get there was very open-ended. Meaning an attorney could apply that same logic anywhere in Texas. It just hasn't been done yet.

DR. JEFFRESS: The actual court case was tried in the federal court in New Orleans. The Severance case. Which is really unusual.

And how the Texas Supreme Court got involved was the judge of the federal court case in New Orleans asked the supreme court, does the easement move if there's an avulsive change, due to a hurricane in this case? And the court said, no, it doesn't.

So how do you have a beach easement that's not on the beach? Is the question.

Anyway. With that, we'll move on to our next speaker, who is Mr. Ray Newby, who's a coastal geologist. And he works for the Texas General Land Office.

And is heavily involved in communications between the General Land Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in coastal matters here in Texas. Particularly related to coastal studies and beneficial use of dredged material.

He's been before the -- he's positioned at the General Land Office. He worked as a hydrogeologist with the Texas Natural Resources Commission.

And before that he was in private practice consulting on assessment and remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater. So, Ray, please.

MR. NEWBY: All right, I think I've got a hot mic now. Thank you, Gary, I appreciate the introduction there. And I'd like to appreciate Gary Magnuson for the invitations --

Okay, is this better? Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to present here.

First off, before I get into the discussion, I'd like to give you a little background on the Land Office, which you've already heard a little bit of.

The Texas General Office, which is chaired by statewide elected official, the land commissioner, who is currently Mr. George P. Bush.

The Land Office is the oldest state agency. A matter of fact, it predates the State of Texas. It was actually setup after the war for independence from Mexico.

How we're involved with coastal issues is that we are the, essentially the state land manager, for both uplands as well as state-owned submerged lands.

Which include all tidally-influenced lands as well as Gulf of Mexico lands offshore to three marine leagues. Which is about ten miles offshore.

We're also the lead agency. We're the administrative agency for the federally recognized coastal management program. We're also involved with beach and dune protection, as what was previously alluded to, as far as oversight of the Texas Open Beaches Act and the Texas Dune Protection Act.

We also administer the state funded Coastal Erosion Program. We're also responsible for Coastal Oil Spill Response.

And then since about, I believe 2011, we've been the lead agency for Disaster Recovery administering federal HUD funds for Hurricane Ike and Dolly recovery. As well as some of the other disasters that the state has experienced.

And as Gary and Steven alluded too also, we get sued frequently. But Texas has almost 400 miles of Gulf shoreline. More than 3,300 miles of bay shoreline.

And of the 18 coastal counties, out of 254 counties, those 18 counties represent about 26 percent of the state's population. Okay.

And some of these next slides I'll go through fairly quickly, because they were covered yesterday.

As you're well aware of by now, the Texas coast is a working coast. We've got several of the top ten ports in the nation. I believe yesterday we had the most vessel movements in the country.

Also, this slide right here represents the oil and gas pipeline network of the nation. In which the Texas and Louisiana Coast are basically the cardio center of the oil and gas industry, of Texas.

Also mentioned yesterday, I believe Galveston is the fourth largest cruise port in the U.S. We also have quite a bit of visitation up and down the coast, from South Padre up to this area. And also ecotourism is beginning to be quite a big industry on the Texas Coast.

Also, commercial and recreational fisheries are a significant part of our state economy. For those of you that are staying down at the Harbor House, if you get a chance to go to Pier 21, talk a walk over to Katy's Seafood at Pier 21 and look at some of the bounties being hauled in from the Gulf.

And these fisheries are very important. But they depend mainly on the coastal ecosystem we've had. Predominately the wetlands.

Ninety-five percent of the commercial and recreational fishery species originate from these wetlands. Those are the nurseries for those fishery species.

And those wetlands, and this is somewhat of a data value, but roughly $6 billion was the rough estimate on the fisheries value of Galveston Bay wetlands. It doesn't include the additional value, ecosystem functional values, that you get from water quality purification as well as flood water retention.

But these ecosystems are in stress. And through some of our planning efforts, we've identified what some of the top issues of concern on the coast are. And here's a sampling of some of the more significant ones.

You see wetland and habitat loss is one of the more significant issues. And let me just say that these are not mutually exclusive issues.

But you have, as was mentioned, gulf beach erosion is fairly widespread. How that affects our tourism and local economy is pretty significant.

Flooding and storm surge. And I'll get into that a little more in the next few slides, is pretty significant.

But getting into some of the coastal engineering concerns that we deal with on a daily basis, working the Texas Coastal zone, is that fundamentally we have a limited knowledge of coastal processes.

Coastal engineering and the supporting science behind it is still a relatively new burgeoning science. It wasn't until after World War II we actually started doing more investigation into the coastal zone to try to understand the processes that affect the coast.

Sediment transport and sediment budgets is one of the big aspects on that. Is trying to identify where your sediment is eroding from. Where is it accreting and how is it getting there between the two.

Inlet and beach dynamics is another big issue that we deal with in trying to understand coastal processes. As well as those processes that affect the estuarine environment. Particularly salinity and hydrodynamics.

There's been a significant growth in the use of numerical models to look at these processes. From circulation to morphological change. But there needs to be more as far as groundtruthing to validate these models.

You've probably heard the adage that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. And that definitely applies here in the coastal zone.

Let me just give you an example of some of the issues we're concerned with here. This is San Luis Pass.

Okay, here's San Luis Pass, this is Galveston Island. And approximately 20 miles from our current location, this is the Southern boundary of Galveston Island, this is San Luis Pass.

Most tidal inlets, in natural functioning, are an equilibrium in that the sediment in this case, which mainly transports from the northeast to the southwest, will come in. You'll have some retention in the pass, with the tidal flow, sediment will continue down the coast.

However, this pass, from our investigations that we've done for about the past two decades or so, has shown indications that it's out of equilibrium. In that a lot of the sediment that's booking down the coast goes into what we call the flood tidal delta, which is this deposit inlet, but is not getting transported back out. For whatever reasons, we're seeing this flood tidal delta grow at a pretty significant rate.

We think it a lot of it has to do with hydrodynamic changes that have been conducted with the creation of some of the channels, such as the Intracoastal Waterway that extends here. And then also the fact that West Bay is connected to the Houston Ship Channel. Which has been widely modified over the modern period.

And so we're looking at this as a potential sand source to nourish Follets Island down here. But we're trying to have a better understanding of the processes, so that if we do go after sand in this flood tidal delta, we just want to make sure that we do no harm to affect the ecosystems around it.

So this is an example of some of the challenges we deal with in our, to try to address coastal erosion and the processes that affect it.

Some other concerns that we have is, if you're doing coastal restoration, we need to have sediment. Either sand for beach nourishment and dune restoration or other types of sediment that are more conducive for wetland restoration.

Texas, in general, is a sand starved coast. We're not blessed with the sheets of sand off the shore of Florida. We mainly have a mud dominated sea floor, out in the Gulf of Mexico.

And so we do quite a bit of sand source investigations with some of our local professional service providers, engineering firms as well as academic institutions like A&M Corpus and A&M Galveston and UT.

We're also trying to develop sediment inventories so that we have a pretty good clearing house of where these conducive sediments, where the most conducive sediments for restoration lie.

Another issue we're diving into is regional settlement management. Which is a term that the Corps of Engineers has been utilizing for about the past decade. And Chris will probably touch in on this a little bit in that beneficiary use of dredge material is a big part of this.

With regional settlement management, you want to have a better ideal in what your natural processes are and how our sediment management activities are affecting those.

Here's an example of a recent development that we have. About three or four years ago we put together what we call the TxSed Coastal Sediments Geodatabase.

We found that there was a lot of geotechnical and geophysical information that was out there, but it was spread in separate locations. And using file cabinets and not really useful.

The Corps of Engineers we found had a bunch of what we call analog files, which are paper reports. And we basically pulled a bunch of those in-house, scanned them, digitized the sediment information.

We also reached out to the academic institutions to get their sediment information. And had put this into the central clearinghouse that's available on the web.

Moving on, I guess some of the additional engineering concerns that we have really come down to the growing concern about climate change and relative sea level rise.

I don't have to explain to the folks here in the room that there's a lot of variability as far as the predicted future sea level rise. And that has significant implications on coastal restoration and coastal protection.

Mainly if you're talking impact on storm surges. If you have a one-foot rise in sea level, that does not equate into a one-foot rise in storm surge.

Your storm surge is actually going to be exponentially higher for every incremental increase in sea level rise. And trying to figure out what your future target sea level is going to be has significant implications.

For instance, if you're going to raise a hurricane protection levee, you know, raising it three feet versus one-foot has got significant economic cost. You also have other real estate considerations as well as environment impacts that you have to consider, when you're talking about these large structures.

And I mentioned previously, about the growth and numerical modeling, there's been a lot of effort to try to look at the future landscape.

What's going to happen if you have a one-foot rise in sea level versus a three foot rise in sea level?

Unfortunately, most of the models that are out there, or most of the tools out there, are inundation models, what we call bathtub models, where you're just taking existing topography and flooding that.

But with that, that's kind of a simplistic view of it. Which is a good tool to begin with, just to give a public an ideal of what to anticipate.

But with the coastal processes, storm surges and so forth, you're going to have significant changes with the shape of the coast, that's not just going to be related to inundation.

And so there have been a few models, such as SLAMM, which is Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model, which tries to emulate how marsh habitats are going to migrate with future sea level rise.

You know, some areas of marshes are basically going to get squeezed out where you have existing development where those marshes do not have room to migrate. That's a fairly simplistic model, but it gives us a better idea of where we're going.

NOAA has developed a better tool called EESLR, which is, I think, Ecological Effects on Sea Level Rise. Which helps us get a better picture of those morphological changes.

But also, as we're looking at coastal restoration and coastal protection, we're trying to get a better idea on what the effects are going to be on critical infrastructure. Your transportation network as well your hospitals and schools and other types of infrastructure.

We're also trying to get a better handle on what it's going to do to our natural systems. I'd like to mention wetlands, but also we're concerned about some of our bay-head deltas as well as the fate of our Barrier Islands.

Gary already showed you this slide here. This is Pier 21, which is a few blocks from us here, where we had over two feet of relative sea level rise.

Gary correctly pointed out that we think about half of this is the footprint of increase of subsidence that we saw in the Houston, Galveston region, from about the 1940's throughout the 1970's.

Subsidence has decreased significantly, but at the predictions, as far as the sea level rise hold true, this could very well be a predictor of our future. Because that accelerated sea level rise would probably overtake the footprint of subsidence.

And because the sea level rise, as well as other factors, such as lack of sufficient sediment, we have some of the highest erosion rates in the nation. Roughly four feet on average is a coast wide value. But we do have some portions of the coast that are eroding in excess of 30. And in some cases, 40 feet per year.

But as far as some of the challenges we face, in addition to the engineering concerns I just mentioned, of course I think you hear it from everybody that the funding is kind of fundamental. There never seems to be enough.

And then when funding does come through, there doesn't seem, at least from our perspective, to be enough planning to be able to accurately prioritize where to best spend those funding sources.

Other challenges we face. Increased coastal development. I think one of the speakers yesterday mentioned the three mega-trends we're seeing as far as the population explosion.

The significant growth of the oil and gas industry we've seen in recent years. As well as the navigation demands that are increasing with the Panama Canal expansion.

But one of the things we're facing on the coast is that we're seeing many new residents still flocking to coastal areas. A lot of these folks are unfamiliar with coastal issues.

They've never experienced a hurricane. They don't know why you really need to evacuate if you are going to be in low lying areas.

For instance, on the west side of Galveston Bay, we've got some very dense residential communities. It's your classic suburbia, but a lot of these folks don't realize that the extreme risks they're in, if and when the next hurricane approaches.

And this population explosion is putting an increased pressure on natural resources, as well as on our critical infrastructure. And we're seeing this manifested in impacts on water quality and water quantity. As well as effects on our local natural ecosystems.

And in general, we kind of have a lack of public, as well as political, awareness of coastal issues. Texas could very well be a microcosm with the U.S. in the fact that the coastal areas compete with the landlocked areas for resources and funding.

We've been asking ourselves the past several years, is Texas a coastal state, are we just a state with a coast?

The 18 coastal counties that I alluded to, mapped earlier, that's 18 versus 236 inland counties. And so it's hard to get resources to address coastal issues. And additionally, it's hard to get adequate resources to do adequate coastal planning.

With that being said, we have attempted to dive into comprehensive coastal planning. This was a little brochure report we put out about four years ago called "Shoring Up our Future."

And we reached out. We held stakeholder meetings up and down the coast with elected officials and other stakeholders.

We had regional technical advisory committees to help identify the issues of concern, that was on a previous slide that I showed you, and was used as a tool to help better educate the legislature, and the public, on the needs of the coastal areas.

Now looking forward, things are starting to look much more promising. Back in November, Texas General Land Office signed a feasibility cost sharing agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers for a $20 million study to look at comprehensive planning for the Texas Coast, within the context of coastal storm risk management and ecosystem restoration.

Some of you may have heard about the concept called the Ike Dike. Which is a Dutch-style coastal spine that has been proposed to protect the Galveston Bay region. That's what we call the coastal barrier alternative.

There are also some inland alternatives as a counter to the Ike Dike. And so the coastal Texas study is diving headlong into this.

I'm sure we'll be making quite a bit press over the next couple years as we proceed with this study. But hopefully it will end up with comprehensive coastal storm risks management for the Galveston Bay region and other vulnerable parts of the Texas Coast.

As was mentioned yesterday, Hurricane Ike was a significant storm. It could have been a whole lot worse had that storm hit further down coast and inundated the industrial areas of the Houston, Galveston area.

I like to tell folks that the Texas City Dikes and the Port Arthur Dikes came within about two, one to two feet from getting overtopped during Hurricane Ike.

And to put that into perspective, we basically came within about a foot of a national depression. Because Hurricane Ike hit three days before Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt.

And so in the economic free fall we were in, we came really close to losing a significant fuel production capability, that would have put us further down into that financial free fall.

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